The economy-wrecking nightmare of skyrocketing oil prices may be coming to an end, with cheaper $50-a-barrel oil becoming the norm through springtime.

Energy analysts say that hair-trigger trading – which had threatened in the summer to send crude soaring to $100 a barrel – has become virtually obsolete almost overnight as investors have grown immune to bad news.

Investors are also wary of getting burned on rapid swings in oil prices – usually fanned by fickle geopolitical events ranging from failed suicide terrorist attacks on Saudi refineries to rallies of noisy Hamas thugs.

Even wholesale slaughter in hotspots like Iraq don’t make the impact on oil traders the way the horrific events once did.

“The news events that used to drive the energy bull market just don’t get the mileage they once did,” said energy analyst Peter Beutel of Cameron Hanover.

He said oil’s bubble market died for good when traders and speculators began in August “ignoring all the news that had been driving their bull market for four years.”

“With all the seismic changes in the thinking of the market, it just became that much more difficult for the bulls to keep making their case,” he said.

Investors awoke this autumn to the reality that the gloom-and-doom events causing their wild swings in prices had already been factored into record-high oil prices.

“At the record of $78.40 on July 19, it was apparent that all the wild cards – geopolitical crises, Iraq, the weather, everything – were already in the price.”

“It was a point when the commodity suddenly became overpriced,” Beutel said.

Other unexpected events also converged late this year to suppress runaway prices, according to reports by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, one of the energy industry’s leading consultants.

World demand for energy never materialized as heavily as expected, Americans started driving less for the first time in 25 years and world production facilities emerged in unprecedented levels.

More than 360 new sites are debuting over the next several years to extract previous energy from conventional, and or the first time, numerous unconventional sources, ranging from sea floors to oil shales in remote corners of the world.

Cambridge said that in the next decade, the non-OPEC countries will outproduce OPEC by a 50 percent margin, providing up to 12.89 million barrels of crude a day compared to 8.36 million barrels a day by OPEC.

Gasoline is also expected to stabilize at an average $2.22 a gallon through the first quarter. One reason for lower demand in the U.S. is that ethanol has replaced up to 10 percent of the gasoline normally consumed, said Beutel.

“I see a possibility of crude at $50 to $55 a barrel by March,” said Beutel.